So yeah, it must all be just a matter of curiosity for you, and there aren't really any stakes. — Srap Tasmaner

I really do think there are stakes when it comes to ecological, economic and political issues. I'm not convinced there are stakes (other than the feelings and preferences of individuals) when it comes to metaphysical matters.

That said if a metaphysical standpoint morphs into evangelizing dogma then of course there will be consequences. Militant ideology, and perhaps even just plain old ideology, religious or otherwise, is and has always been a more or less significant problem for humanity.

:up:

So you're like - I don't know - a tourist? — Srap Tasmaner

Insinuating what? That I'm not really a player but a spectator?

I'm sorry for implying that, it's just how I've personally always seen it. Philosophy is of course an activity, people might have different goals in doing it, I just can't understand what they are. — goremand

I see philosophy as a process of firstly getting clear as to just what my situation, epistemologically speaking, is. What can i reasonably be said to know? I've come to the conclusion that I know and can know very little.

It doesn't stop there, though—the most salient question for me then would be "how best to live?". If I know very little, can be certain of very little, then living happily with ignorance and uncertainty would seem to be the most important goal.

You'd have to show the truth to be a necessary consequence of a universally held set of assumptions. But well, I didn't literally mean "everyone", just everyone who participates in philosophical discourse. — goremand

The only potential universally held assumption (or is it a realization?) that I can think of is that we know and can know very little. As the example of Socrates shows, it is probably only those who have thought critically and extensively that will come to this realization.

Once this is realized we still need to work with provisional hypotheses in order to live, so while human ignorance and uncertainty might be in principle the one thing we could all agree upon, the ongoing choice of provisional hypotheses by which to live would likely come down to personal predilection.

What is desirable about "influence" per se? I mean that word runs the gamut from peer pressure to lobotomy. What is desirable to me is only the possibility of rational persuasion. — goremand

I agree with you that the only benign influence when it comes to what to believe would be one of rational persuasion, but I would include as rational persuasion both practical and pure reason. It's the practical reason part where it becomes tricky, but I can't see how it can reasonably be ruled out.

If an alien species from another planet saw Moore with his raised hand, they might be just as certain as Moore that something with a specific meaning was taking place, but within their alien language game the sense of the event would be entirely different that it is for Moore. It would not be a question of doubting Moore’s assertion, but of his assertion being irrelevant to their perspective. — Joshs

In any case the alien sees a hand even if he doesn't call it such.

Because it is interesting? Why do you bother?

Also I think it may be possible to get clear about the alternatives and what they each presuppose, even though deciding between them cannot be definitively justified.

OK, but specifying the premises, and determining how foundational they are, has been the longstanding task of philosophy, with no obvious right answer in sight. It's like saying, "Move the world? Sure, no problem, just give me a very large lever . . ." — J

To take one prominent example of long-standing metaphysical disagreement some say mind is foundational, while others say matter is foundational. The truth regarding that would seem to be undecidable apart from what seems most plausible in light of the whole of human experience. Unfortunately, there is no clear criterion that could determine what is most plausible, that is what the whole of human experience actually shows, so it seems to come down to personal taste.

Only once you have your preferred premise can rationality definitively enter the fray and it consists simply in being consistent with your premise in the elaboration of your thinking.

Observation takes place through an apparatus of perception, which includes not just telescopes and microscopes, but conceptual apparatuses of interpretation. — Joshs

Of course there is a sense in which our perceptions are always already interpretations. But we are blind to how the body/brain does that. It is pre-cognitive and so cannot be taken into account.

I certainly would. I mean, the theoretical end goal of philosophy is for everyone to believe the same thing, that thing being the truth. In my opinion this idea of private justification instead promotes a static kind of diversity, where a bunch of dogmatists each stay in their respective camp and engage in discourse only performatively. — goremand

You speak as though that purported "end goal" is a given. How would any philosophical truth ever be demonstrable such as to gain universal assent? I haven't spoken in terms of "private justification". If people have their own philosophies and recognize them to be personal preferences where would be the space for dogmatism? Discussion would still allow for folk to be influenced by others.

IF philosophy proceeds rationally, and can give a definition of what rationality is, THEN all of these consequences seem to follow. I'm more unsure than perhaps you imagine about whether the IF is correct. — J

What is rationality other than consistent thinking from some foundational premise or other? As to the premises, how are they to be justified?

Well, for those presupposed to doubt it, there are plenty of grounds for doubt. For those predisposed to believe it, there are plenty of grounds for belief. The difficulty is, that it is not a question that is easily adjuticable, at least by objective measures. But I do say that, absent the 'dimension of value', philosophy tends to devolve into disputes over the meaning of propositions, rather than a life-changing wisdom, which I believe was its original intent. — Wayfarer

Right and the very fact that there seems to be to both sides "plenty of grounds for doubt and belief" respectively shows that it is not a subject which can be intersubjectively decided. Jaspers says that philosophy itself is entirely a matter of personal faith and I agree with that assessment. "To each there own philosophy" I say, because that takes proper account of human diversity. Would you have it any other way?

Ironically, considering what you say about "disputes over the meaning of propositions", it seems that it is only philosophy as conceptual analysis and clarification which could claim any intersubjective adjudicability or objectivity, and even there grounds for dispute still seem to exist...

In the welter of conflicting opinions which is human life there seems little room for absolute authority. All we seem to have is the relative authority of empirical fact.

But don't simulation or modelling at the end of the day need observation to be meaningful? Simulation and modelling unobserved by humans don't exist, therefore meaningless? — Corvus

Also simulation or modeling can only be of that which is observed else it would be simulation or modeling of nothing.

In this case a more innocent framing would perhaps be that Janus is asking questions because he doesn't understand what you mean? The way I see it, what you're saying is that you shouldn't have to explain yourself because we would automatically understand you if only we hadn't grown up in scientistic western society. — goremand

The question was posed to @J. I know how @Wayfarer thinks of "higher". He thinks we moderns have lost, not merely an older set of cultural attitudes, beliefs and dispositions, but some actual higher knowledge and understanding of a transcendent nature—an understanding of reality itself which has been lost to the modern psyche.

Many today think this life is all there is. Wayfarer thinks the sages somehow were able to know that this is not true, that the truth is we may be resurrected to eternal life or reborn into more favorable circumstances depending on our karma. The obvious problem for this supposition is that those two main supposed paradigms of spiritual knowledge are not compatible with one another, which rather casts doubt on their status as knowledge. He doesn't want to accept that it is really just faith, even among those who are supposedly enlightened or "born again".

Quality represents a basis of values that we recognize intuitively but cannot fully capture within language or logic. But as it challenges 'subject-object duality' then it can't be characterised in objective terms - which generally means it is often regarded as being religious. Hence, a matter of faith - and subjective! — Wayfarer

Quality is aesthetic or ethical, something felt to be beautiful or good or true (in the restricted sense of "ringing true") or else ugly, bad and false. There definitely are commonalties between what folk generally consider to be "of quality" but there is no strict determinant of quality. As the old saying goes "there is no accounting for taste".

I don't want to be seen as naively endorsing the idea of "highest" as "best" or "most perspicuous" that is often associated with philosophy. But also it was an attempt to capture the ambiguity of "highest," which I discuss in the OP. "Highest" can mean what I just wrote -- "best," more or less -- or it can mean "up a level, beyond which there are no more levels," without comment on value. I raised the possibility that phil. discourse is only highest in this sense. — J

I see philosophy as being concerned with understanding the human condition in the broadest and most comprehensive ways. It is different from psychology in that it looks, not just at human motivation, but at the human relationship to the human-created world, and to nature as a cosmic whole.

So I don't see it as a matter of levels but of comprehensiveness. All the other fields of inquiry feed into philosophy, provide it with its subject matter and, if we are lucky, correct its excesses.

:up: A good coherently nonsensical oldie!

None of which provides a justifiably true belief of what demarcates mind from non-mind. — javra

It's not a matter of justified true belief but rather of the common usage of a word which demonstrates a certain range of understandings. We have no reason to impute mind to those things the experience of which gives us no reason to impute mind to them.

Repetition of unjustified affirmations such as that "we all know what 'mind' is in the ordinary sense" does not make the affirmation true — javra

I didn't say that we all know what mind is in the ordinary sense I said that we know what we mean when we say things which reflect an ordinary common understanding. You are trying to morph what I say into something you feel you can argue against rather than addressing it as it is it seems.

By what means do you conclude that trees and insentient, as in not able to perceive things such as gravity and light in their own non-animal based ways? — javra

Again I haven't said anything whatsoever about whether trees are sentient and the question has no bearing that I can tell on the question of their mind independent existence.

But since I, again, don't want to play devil's advocate, I'll do my best to leave you to it in turn. — javra

I haven't asked you to leave me to io it. On the contrary I was hoping for a sensible discussion. But you seem disinclined to address what I say on its own terms with reasoned counterpoints, and you always seem to be very ready to "leave me to it" when questions that present difficulties for your view are posed.

I don't so far find justification for this claim. But groovy all the same. Then, please enlighten me as to what we all know "mind" to be in the ordinary sense. — javra

We know what we mean when we say such things as "I changed my mind", "I made up my mind", "I don't mind", " I did that task mindfully", "mind your step" and so on...there are countless examples. They suggest that what we understand as mind is really minding, a verb not a noun, an activity not an object. Of course this is not to say that reification of that activity does not often set in.

I'll start here: What aspect of what we are aware of will not be an aspect of our own minds? — javra

Everything in the so-called external world is not an aspect of our own minds. Of course our perception of those things is a form of minding, but it does not follow that the things are forms of minding. It seems impossible to make sense of the idea that they could be. If the tree I see and the tree you see are forms of our respective mindings then how is that we obviously see the same tree? That we see the same tree suggests that the tree is mind-independent.

And to address the OP, it does make a difference what we believe regarding the question of realism vs anti-realism simply because different beliefs will lead to different dispositions and hence to different actions, affiliations and cultures.

That said, I agree there is also a sense in which it doesn't make a fatal difference as the example of very good theistic scientists, to cite just one example, shows. (Note: I am not suggesting that theism is necessarily aligned with either realism or idealism).

Nice. — Tom Storm

:cool:

Hence, as this one of many examples tries to illustrate, the very notion of "mind-independence" is thoroughly contingent on what one understands by the term "mind". Via at least certain interpretations, there is no reason to deny a reality independent of each and every individual non-effete mind (yours, mine, etc.) to which we all conform that is nevertheless of itself an effete mind and, hence, mind-dependent. — javra

The problem is that we all know what we mean by 'mind' in the ordinary context. In the extraordinary context the notion is nothing more than a vague gesturing. All very good for poetry, but for ontology not so much.

So, we have every reason to believe that the things of the world are independent of our minds and virtually no reason to believe otherwise.

Then if you still want to claim that things are mind-dependent you need some notion of a collective or universal or "effete" mind, and these notions cannot be coherently discoursed because there is no common experience to definitively relate them to.

Perhaps it's about joining up the stuff we can talk about in a coherent fashion.

Of course, you can show stuff as well as say it. — Banno

Coherence exists within some context or other. Philosophers have invented language games wherein they purport to be somehow saying the unsayable. Perhaps that would be, if successful, a form of showing rather than saying, of implicit allusion rather than literal explicitation.

This reminds of one of Ashleigh Brilliant's sayings: "My biggest problem is what to do about all the things I can't do anything about".

Perhaps the philosophers' biggest problem is what to say about all the things they cannot say anything about.

My question is: is that always going to be a Cartesian self? I think it might be that everytime we go to explain the self, we'll automatically conjure some kind of independent soul. What do you think? — frank

I think of different selves as being nothing more than different kinds of disposition or orientation. Do we need a notion of soul to understand that or simply the notions of distinctively individual awareness, focus and intelligence?

I just noticed this thread and have not read it through so please excuse my question if it has already been asked and answered; what do you mean by "highest"? Most comprehensive or overarching. most critical, most meta-cognitive? Or most spiritual, most enlightening, wisest?

Consciousness is something that knows of its own being even in the absence of stimuli. — Wayfarer

What theory of consciousness allows the statement "you could be conscious even without an external world" to be true? — Brenner T

The claim is wrong simply because there is never for anyone alive an absence of stimuli.

muddle classes — Swanty

Is this a jokey play on words or are you a New Zealander?

Democracy Song by Leonard Cohen


It's coming through a hole in the air,
From those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feel
That this ain't exactly real
Or it's real, but it ain't exactly there

From the wars against disorder
From the sirens night and day
From the fires of the homeless
From the ashes of the gay
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming through a crack in the wall
On a visionary flood of alcohol
From the staggering account
Of the Sermon on the Mount
Which I don't pretend to understand at all

It's coming from the silence
On the dock of the bay
From the brave, the bold, the battered
Heart of Chevrolet
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the sorrow in the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin'
That goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat

From the wells of disappointment
Where the women kneel to pray
For the grace of God in the desert here
And the desert far away
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on

It's coming to America first
The cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
And the machinery for change
And it's here they got the spiritual thirst

It's here the family's broken
And it's here the lonely say
That the heart has got to open
In a fundamental way
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the women and the men
O baby, we'll be making love again
We'll be going down so deep
The river's going to weep
And the mountain's going to shout Amen!
It's coming like the tidal flood
Beneath the lunar sway
Imperial, mysterious
In amorous array
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen

But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
That Time cannot decay
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
This little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

:roll: :yawn: Does he claim the conditions and the responses are the same for all or not?

Edit: I suspect you won't answer this because to do so would be damning for your boy's position (and I imagine, yours).

All of what you said is pretty much the opposite of Schopenhauer's claim. — schopenhauer1

So Schopenhauer claims there is no diversity in the ways people respond to their conditions? In that case he would obviously be mistaken.

I don't think it works like that. First off, we know we die and that there is a demise. Then there is the fact that we are lacking and strive for satiation. These are just built into the framework. They are not situational, though situational harms add to it. — schopenhauer1

Sure we know we die. That fact may cause some to suffer and not others. As I said earlier its a matter of attitude and disposition. I don't know what you mean when you say "we are lacking". Lacking what? For example say I am hungry. If I have food then no problem. If I don't have food then I will possibly suffer as per what I said previously—that suffering comes from wanting the circumstances of my life to be different than they are. Even then I may only suffer if I have no means of changing those circumstances to a
more congenial situation or changing my attitude such that I no longer wish my life to be different than it is.

This contradicts what I believe to be true from Schopenhauer's observation: — schopenhauer1

Please lay out the point you want to make. I am not inclined to read that passage and have to try to figure out what the counterpoint to what I said is.

Suffering as Schopenhauer defined it, is structural and contingent, pleasure is only contingent. As a more straightforward point, suffering is all that matters in axiological estimations. — schopenhauer1

I'm not sure what you mean. I would say that absence of pleasure brings suffering and that absence of pain brings pleasure. Life is inherently pleasurable when I am not experiencing some kind of pain and inherently painful when I am not experiencing some kind of pleasure.

Whether experiences are painful or pleasurable can have much to do with the attitude we hold towards those experiences.

Indeed, and this is an important insight, yet it’s often put aside. — schopenhauer1

Right and it would be equally absurd to claim that existence is completely free from pleasure.

Pain is the negative aspect of existence. Pleasure is the positive. It would be absurd to claim that existence is completely free from suffering.

Nah, I mean the concept of suffering is entailed in being self-aware of existence. If you are not self-aware (of existence), you probably don't understand about suffering as a concept, even though you may suffer. — schopenhauer1

Suffering is not inevitable merely on account of being aware or self-aware. Awareness may be a necessary, bit not a sufficient, condition for suffering.

It’s caused when you are conscious, and amplified and a difference even in kind of suffering through self-awareness of existence. — schopenhauer1

Suffering is not caused merely by being conscious or being self-aware. You could be conscious and self-aware and not suffer, if by suffering you mean a general condition and not chronic pain or the suffering caused by illness.

It is laughable that you consider any counterargument but not your own taken to be self-evident assertions to be a "gotcha".

I'm only interested in reading (more than once) good arguments and not in being advised to go read this or that. If you have a decent argument you can set it out in your own words.

I'm running out of steam and getting short on time. I still don't get why you defend physicalism against the possibility of non-physicalism when you so clearly expressed that:

There is no guarantee that physicalism is false. Nor is there a guarantee that it is true. The real issue as I see it is what does it matter? Why should we mind whether physicalism is true or false? — javra

Firstly I'm not defending physicalism but refuting the claims of its supposed inconsistency.

I've provided this explanation, if not in full then in part: there can be no objective good - and hence no objective morality - within any system of physicalism.

You can, of course, evidence me wrong by pointing out any physicalist system wherein there can be coherently maintained an objective good.

But I'd like to know: why does all of this matter to you? — javra

You haven't explained why there can be no objective good under physicalism. I gave you examples to show that there can. You also haven't explained how there could be objective good under idealist or antirealist systems without positing a lawgiver apart from appeals to human flourishing and harmony etc which don't depend on any particular metaphysics.

Only the ethical and the aesthetical matter to me and I don't see those as being dependent on any particular metaphysic, and that is why the debate between materialism and idealism doesn't matter to me.

I am merely interested to see if proponents of idealism can show that such values are only or at least better supported by idealism (absent a lawgiver). Apparently that cannot be shown, at least not by you or anyone else I've encountered.

Thanks for trying anyway.

On what grounds if both percepts are physical in the same way via the functioning of the brain. (To better drive the point home, I'll specify that the observer of the cat is not surrounded by others - and that he observes a cat which he has no reason to presume is a hallucination even though it is.) — javra

In the case of the real cat there would be light reflected from it which enters the eye, etc. You know the story. In any case I have never had such a realistic hallucination, even during my extensive use of hallucinogens. I don't know anyone else who has either. I'm not saying such a thing is impossible, but if it is possible the level of delusion would be extreme.

Via examples, the Platonic / Neoplatonic notion of the Good can only be a non-physical ideal - one that is nevertheless the ultimate reality. But please note: no law-giver created or else decreed the Good in either system of understanding. And such objective good requires an non-physicalist metaphysics. Wtih the occurrence of such an objective good then also is entailed an objective morality. — javra

How would the objective morality in such a belief system be enforced other than via people believing in it? If it is non-physical how could such a thing exist if not in some universal mind. Goodness is a value and as far as I can see values can exist only in, be held by, minds. You seem to be gesturing at something, but it lacks coherent detail.

I acknowledge the sentiment, but none of this is a rational grounding for what is good. Slavery was once generally important to people, for example. Would that make slavery morally good? And on what grounds would an Orwellian 1984 not last long? Besides, why is lasting long a good to be aspired toward within physicalism? — javra

Why is it not a practical rational grounding? If you want a well-functioning society that fosters human flourishing and harmony why would you not want the most significant moral principles to govern? Slavery is a moral failure to be sure. It is pre-rationally normal for humans to care predominately about their own welfare and the welfare of those close to them. I don't believe the abolition of slavery depended on any higher principle. It depended on people having compassion and coming to count those who were previously thought to be of no significance to be of significance after all. We see the same thing happening today (although not enough to be sure) with animal welfare. Physicalism does not seem to be an impediment to such sentiments.

Oppressive dictatorships cannot last. Oppressed people will eventually become fed up and revolt. Humans may not have achieved much in the way of harmoniously living together but that lack of achievement has chiefly occurred in societies where people have believed in a higher good or deity. From a purely rational perspective there is no reason to grant one person more rights or privileges than another. So slavery itself can only be supported by practical reasons, and those reasons are not good ones because they promote disharmony.

How is a distinction between the perceived physical cat and the perceived non-physical cat to be made when both are equally "neural process and hence physical" as perceptions? — javra

The hallucinated cat is not a cat at all. The perceived cat is a cat.

There is here a warrantless conflation between lawgiver and afterlife. See, for example, Buddhism. I said "no" to your assumption of there being a deity (a law-giver) which ordains an objective good. — javra

I'm not conflating lawgiver and afterlife. I'm asking how physicalism could undermine the idea of there being consequences for immoral actions. I'm wondering how non-physicalism could support morality in any way that physicalism cannot, since that seemed to be your contention. You haven't attempted to address that question.

And, within physicalism, why are these to be deemed "good"? — javra

Because they are generally important to people, and because a society with moral principles that promoted general disharmony and suffering could not last long. It would necessarily be despotic.

The question again was "are hallucinations physical?". So if a person hallucinates a stray cat running along their path, is the hallucinated cat physical? — javra

The hallucination is a neural process and hence physical. Of course it is not a physical (real) cat. I see no inconsistency there but rather a conflation between the hallucination and what is hallucinated.

No. Reread what I've stated more attentively before replying and you might see how this assumption is unwarranted. — javra

I read it attentively the first time and I can't see what in a non-physicalist model the objective support for morality could be other than a lawgiver or else some kind of karmic threat of having to pay for transgressions. And again, I don't see how any of that could work absent the assumption of an afterlife.

And on what is this notion of what a "good life" is itself grounded, philosophically speaking within systems of physicalism? I'm not here addressing dispositions. I'm addressing logical reasoning. — javra

It would be grounded on human flourishing and social harmony. Of course there will be inconsistency if you presume that those things are not grounded in our physical embodiedness. Absent that assumption I see no inconsistency. In other words on the physicalists assumptions there are no inconsistencies even though there may be on yours.

There a bunch of other reasons, but as one significant gripe I have with it (here placing its inconsistencies aside), if physicalism is true, then this will easily lead to - if it does not directly entail - moral nihilism. And it certainly does away with any possibility of an objective good. — javra

By "inconsistencies" I take it you mean that physicalism is not consistent with our "normal' intuitions about the nature of mind and consciousness and the subject?

Anyway you've left those aside so are you saying that because (many or most?) people need to believe that moral laws are given by a higher (necessarily non-physical) power, physicalism in denying the existence of such a law-giver will lead to moral nihilism?

I don't think the idea of an objective moral good depends on a law-giver. I believe there are objective facts about human flourishing and suffering and social needs and social harmony which support the most basic and significant moral injunctions (usually proscriptions).

Ergo, enduring the suffering of life with as much grace as possible when things get rough is stupid - and there is no ultimate good to aspire toward, well, other than one's personal death when life gets a bit too much. — javra

What about the idea of living a good life. improving the lives of others. Do you believe that it's all pointless if there is no afterlife? It may be for you but I'm sure there are many people who don't think this way. Thinking this way is after all only a particular attitude or disposition not a reflection of objective truth.

:cool:

:up:

But then nothing is both alive and dead at the same time. — Banno

Right. I think this is the nub. 'Not-A' should strictly be the negation of 'A'. We cannot say 'if something is alive, then it is dead' even if we can say 'if something is alive then it will be dead'.

Also, in ordinary language 'not-A' can alternatively be anything which is not A. As you point out death is not-A in the second sense but it not strictly the negation of life. The strict negation of life would be no life. Language is messy.